He was one of the first stars loaded with Oscar nominations who dared to try his luck on television starring in high-quality miniseries, and it certainly hasn't gone badly for him. In 2012 she won the Emmy and the Golden Globe for her work in Mildred Pierce, directed by Todd Haynes himself, and nine years later she returned to the medium with Mare of Easttown, for which she won those same awards again. . Kate Winslet has not waited so long to repeat the bet with HBO, and now she returns with The Regime, a miniseries in a comedy tone that directed by another master of cinema, Stephen Frears, tells the story of a dictator named Elena who must carry out a imaginary country while dealing with his own ghosts and insecurities. The cast of the series, which HBO Max premieres in Spain next Monday the 4th, also includes Hugh Grant, Andrea Riseborough, Martha Plimpton and Matthias Schoenaerts.
Her character is a very complex woman, who has many facets. What was it like for her to transform into Elena?
It was very interesting, precisely for that reason, because I had to discover how I had to interpret him. All of us actors who participated in this project were very lucky because they sent us the scripts for the complete series that Will and his team had already finished. That helped us a lot, because the tone the story had to have was already perfectly established. We all understood what they were going to need from us, and at the same time we knew that we were going to have the freedom to speak as we wanted because The Regime takes place in an imaginary country in Central Europe. It was also important to connect with the absurd aspect of the proposal. The truth is that to work on The Regime I had to have a very brave attitude, and start by not being heard the way I speak in real life. The series was initially going to be called “The Palace” and in recent years there have been many stories on television that were recreations of real events linked to the British monarchy. If the series is called “The Palace,” and I play this role speaking with my English accent, I was afraid that the audience would spend the first episode trying to understand if there was any reference in our story to what happens in Buckingham. So I had to invent something different.
The relationship that his character has with his father's corpse is interesting...
Of course, because a person keeping the body of his late father and going down to talk to him from time to time is a good reflection of an unstable emotional state. And that gave me the space to explore that side of him. We also talked with Will, Steven and Jess about the possibility that she manifested this instability in her clothing and the way she behaves with others, which sometimes leads her to dress in a grotesque and sexual way.
Elena carries one reality in her public life and another behind the scenes. What was it like for her to develop those two aspects of the character?
It was fabulous, because all the time we had the chance to explore what was happening behind the curtains. Even when she was giving a speech or talking to her people, she always had the option to see what was going on behind her, even if it involved showing her feet under the desk, which is not something you're typically going to see from a politician when It's in front of an audience, and that helped me a lot in my performance. Agnes, Andrea Riseborough's character, spends all her time in the hallways of the presidential palace, trying to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible while avoiding being seen, and the same goes for Elena, who has to do everything secretly, to try not to notice the mask he always wears. It was important for the audience to see what the harsh reality of her is, because all the time she is trying to hide who she really is. Every time she asks her assistant if she looks good, she doesn't need or wait for the answer, because she convinces herself that she looks good. It's just that when she was young, Elena had to build a shell for herself because she never received what she needed. That's how she managed to survive. Obviously we had to be very careful that the humor did not obscure the complex dramatic reality of this story.
Also in “The Regime” there is an unusual love story...
It's true. Totally unexpected, perverse, extraordinarily strange and at the same time beautiful between these two social misfits who suddenly meet and become obsessed with each other. There is something very touching about the relationship between Elena and Zubak, Matthias Schoenaerts' character. With it we had to find a rhythm and an energy that was as captivating as it was quirky, because that was the way for the audience to follow us until the end without knowing what is going to happen. We were always looking for new things, and there were even a couple of moments when we got tempted and had to ask those who couldn't stop laughing to leave the set.
Elena has studied and qualified as a doctor. How important is this detail when creating the character?
It's very important. I am very grateful to have that element in his personal history, which is based on education, training and talent, because giving him qualifications helped me not go too far down the path of absurdity. Elena is an intelligent woman, a trained doctor, but at the same time she can get carried away by her other facets, particularly the sexual one, and that leads her to dress in that tawdry and ordinary way in order to achieve her goals or simply to overcome her own feelings. rolls. The truth is that I appreciated the different point of view that having had an education gave her, because ultimately, that shows that this woman is unquestionably intelligent, even though she sometimes gets carried away and creates other ridiculous options.
